Peripheral cosmopolitanism: remixing China, articulating Kenya in a music video

This article examines how Kenyan gospel dancehall artist Jabidii musically reconfigures China’s contemporary geopolitical and economic presence in Kenya. I frame this process as peripheral cosmopolitanism, a mode of negotiating global disjuncture from Nairobi’s informal settlements through acts of sonic and cultural remix. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in Nairobi, I situate Jabidii’s 2018 music video ‘China (Chinku)’ within the city’s transnational music ecologies and informal media infrastructures where Afro-diasporic sound, Euro-American Christianity, and Hong Kong kung fu cinema converge in unexpected ways. By tracing how Jabidii assembles these disparate influences in his music video, I show how peripheral conditions provide the grounds from which imaginaries of global belonging emerge. I argue that ‘China (Chinku)’ refracts the asymmetries of China–Kenya relations into a vernacular form of musical play and critique, illustrating the everyday cultural practices through which the scripts of global power are locally overdubbed.